Scientific thinking and logical fallacies
When we think of science, we think of repeatable experiments. That is, if you submerge a bar of Ivory soap in the water a hundred times and see that it always rises to the top, you can conclude that Ivory soap floats. Francis Bacon’s idea of the scientific method was to identify a hypothesis, conduct an experiment, and come to conclusions. Karl Popper adds a bit to that, suggesting that science is much better at disproving things than proving them. According to Popper, we can’t really prove things, as much as say that a point (water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit) is demonstrated reliably enough that we can assume it is true and build on it. These approaches have analogs to testing.
Science gets a little more difficult when we get to things that are not reproducible, such as historical artifacts and economics. Still, we can apply something such as scientific thinking. To verify a historical document, we can look at where...